


Rescue

by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-24
Updated: 2010-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:45:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Dresden doesn't usually rescue criminals -- but when it comes to Gentleman Johnny Marcone, few things proceed as usual. That's obviously the only reason why, months after the rescue, it's Harry who's asking Marcone for help.</p><p>Part I set during Marcone's captivity in Small Favor; part II set between Small Favor and Turn Coat. Rating for language and implied violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Marcone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everysecondtues (tuesday)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/gifts).



> Written as part of the Live Long and Marry fandom auction to support gay marriage in California.

Gentleman Johnny Marcone isn’t used to being rescued. It’s a fundamental part of his character that he’s never depended upon others to save him from any kind of danger. He has always known, deep down, that he can’t trust anyone but himself. If he gets himself into a situation, he’s the only person who he can logically trust to get himself out of it.

So when he finds himself abducted by magical forces way beyond his control, it scares the shit out of him, because he knows that none of the people who work for him can so much as lift a finger to save him. Certainly some of them, Gard and Hendricks in particular, have the ability to call for help. They can be trusted to understand, if not all of what has happened, at least some of it. They will know who to go to with their knowledge and their questions. But he can’t _trust_ them to do it. He feels like the star of a bad spy movie, the mantra “trust no one” beaten into him with every blow, seared into his skin with every moment of the torture his nameless captors inflict. With his life or death determined by the whim of beings thousands of years older and wiser and, he ought to face it, _evil_-er than he is, Marcone knows that things are not looking up. He is not a man to resign himself to anything—he is not a man to go down without a fight—but there is a point, one that he does not like to think about, when he thinks about letting go, and what it would be like not to have to fight any more.

***

Marcone’s greatest teacher in the art of constructing a criminal empire is Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote in his advice to the leader of an Italian Renaissance city-state that it is better to be feared than loved. Marcone understood this instinctively, before he read _The Prince_, and Machiavelli’s words seem to him a mere reiteration of what his own experience has taught him. Fear is what has made Marcone the toughest crime leader Chicago’s ever seen. Fear has earned him some modicum of respect in the criminal underground, and one hell of a reputation. He hears what they say about him, in furtive whispers: mess with this guy? Are you crazy?

Fear has its uses. But people who fear you are less likely to come to your aid if you need it. If something comes along that’s big enough to scare _you_, they’re liable to stand aside and wait for it to finish you off. That’s why you can never show them that you’re afraid. Most of the time it works, and they believe you have nerves of steel, that you’re more than human, but just because they’re underlings doesn’t mean they’re stupid. There are some things that you have to be inhuman not to fear, and for all his apparent soullessness, Marcone is still human. He’s reminded—oh, the irony, as he sits there in this godforsaken cell, in the depths of captivity—of Shakespeare. If you prick us, do we not bleed? Like Shylock, he will have his pound of flesh.

The wizard doesn’t fear him. Oh, Dresden has a heavy dose of respect for Marcone’s powers of manipulation and deceit, but Marcone knows it’s not fear. He’s known since that first soulgaze. He’s known in all of their dealings since. Dresden isn’t the kind of man to fear what he sees as a petty criminal—even a damn good one like Marcone. It takes something truly evil to frighten him. To the average person, Marcone is used to being as bad as bad can get, but the wizard is far from normal. In his line of work, the wizard has faced up against monsters that would make Marcone seem like a lovable stray. And a part of Marcone hates him for it. He’s used to being feared. People who are afraid of him, he knows how to handle.

People who aren’t? Well, he’s only ever met the one.

He does not count his current captors as people. He does not doubt that they do not fear him at all.

***

It’s not pride to acknowledge that he’s far too important to simply be abducted accidentally. The wards around his safe-house are too strong to have been broken simply upon a whim. They want him, for something specific, something _evil_. Marcone does not live in a world of black and white, preferring to skulk around in a perpetual gray area of his own making, but there are moments when things become so extreme that he is forced into acknowledging absolutes. And in his captives, he has found a blackness so entire that even his minimal conscience recoils.

Marcone is not the kind of man to hope. To hope is to admit to dependence upon a force outside of himself. Hope implies trust—to hope for something better is to trust that someone out there will present it to you—and Marcone does not rely on trust.

But if he did hope—if in his weakness he allowed himself a sliver of trust in another—he would have hoped that somehow, news of his disappearance spread to the wizard, whose sense of honor and justice comes as close to Good as Marcone can comprehend, whose righteousness just might be enough to save Marcone’s ass.

_Damn him. Why isn’t the bastard coming?_

And then there he is, riding in on that goddamn proverbial white horse to save the day and Marcone’s hide in one idiotic hare-brained daring courageous swoop, just as predicted. Dresden, who is not quite an enemy but certainly not a friend, an ally only against his own better judgment. Dresden, who is a simple creature, really, and who Marcone ought to be able to control. Dresden, who on a fundamental level, Marcone will never understand. He knows with cool certainty that he would not return the favor and save the wizard’s hide without some perceived personal benefit.

Or would he? Marcone did not get to where he is today by feeling beholden to people; it does not pay to have a sense of obligation or duty toward others once the debt has been repaid. But even after he has he has covered up the truth surrounding the escapade on that island and elsewhere, even after he feeds money to silence greedy maws and does some of the dirty work the wizard would never undertake himself, he feels the connection between them persist. It is completely irrational. It is also completely impossible to sever.


	2. Dresden

I don’t usually rescue criminals.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’ve got a death wish for Marcone. Hell, if I so much as laid a finger on the guy, half of Chicago’s underworld would be after me within minutes. Not to mention that, as a freeholding lord under the Unseelie Accords, he’s technically protected by the _other_ half of Chicago’s underworld, too—you know, the supernatural half. And seeing as how I like my head attached to my body, not being ceremonially presented to that conniving sonofabitch on a silver platter, there’s not much I can do about it.

But it didn’t stop me from thinking, for a moment back in that abandoned lighthouse, that maybe he was getting what he deserved—that maybe, karma had finally caught up with “Gentleman” Johnny Marcone, and it wasn’t too happy with him.

That moment was fleeting, and sane Harry—in retrospect I wonder if it wasn’t perhaps insane Harry—took over and reminded me that the aforementioned sonofabitch was still a person, albeit only just, and that it was in _my_ best interests for him to leave this confrontation with his humanity still intact and with the ability to control his own actions. The _last_ thing I needed was a fucking Denarian crime lord out to get me.

So, yeah, I saved him. Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t like I meant to.

***

But still, I saved him. That should mean something. Right? That should mean that he owes me one.

In the most practical sense, I don’t want that scumbag to owe me anything. I don’t want to admit that there’s any possibility _he_ could do something for _me_. But one of the problems with being a good guy is that it’s a lot harder to make the same kinds of connections that you make when you’re, well, _not_. As Marcone is emphatically not.

I don’t like asking people for help. I _really_ don’t like asking people who are almost not human enough to deserve being labeled as “people” for help. But I also don’t like the idea of not asking the aforementioned non-person for some assistance—which he damn well owes me anyway—if it means that there’s an innocent left suffering. When the damsel’s in distress, there’s really no option but to pull out all the stops, follow up on all the leads, and ask even the most repugnant of sources.

Following this rather destructive train of thought, it’s no surprise that I find myself, rather against my will, on Johnny Marcone’s doorstep, almost absolutely at his mercy.

***

“I didn’t do it for you, you know.” There are a thousand things I should say, but somehow that’s the only one that comes out.

A smirk on that tiger’s face, too handsome for its own good. Eyes the color of money bore into me, and I’m reminded of that first meeting when he tricked me into a soulgaze. After all these years, that moment is still embedded firmly into my mind, impossible to ignore. And after all these years, I can’t help but think that I got the short end of the deal, because whenever he looks at me now, he has this ineffable air of _knowing_ me. Better than I know him, that’s for sure.

He leans back in his chair, takes his time in responding. When he does talk, it’s with a voice as smooth as his stare. “Don’t worry, Dresden. I promise not to take it personally.” The smirk softens. “But enough of the niceties. I assume that this is not a social call?”

I wish I had a stare like that. But wizards don’t get too much practice interacting with people foolish enough to look at us, really _look_, eyeball to eyeball, so I’m no good at staring.

I am, however, remarkably talented at looking away, and I implement this talent now, looking past Marcone to the bookshelf behind his desk. I wonder what kinds of books Chicago’s baddest mobster reads. Perhaps _The Godfather_? No, Harry, stop it. Focus. “The way I see it, you owe me,” I say to him, ready to present the full line of my logic if he refutes this claim.

He doesn’t. Instead, he nods and says, “Perhaps I do. What would you ask of me?”

I swallow once, not having expected such a quick response. “Information.” I pull a file out of my duster and slide it across the desk to him. He opens the manila envelope and glances briefly at the picture of the young woman paper clipped to the front of a short stack of documents. His eyes, when he looks back at me, carry that same knowing look—the one that pisses me off, because what right does _he_ have to know anything about me?

“Another missing persons case?” he inquires casually. “What do you think I can do?”

“I think you can help me find her.”

“And what makes you think that?”

The answer’s simple enough—I know he’s got his fingers in every part of this city’s pie—but I don’t want to have to _say_ it to him. He might get the idea that he’s important. Or, horror of horrors, _necessary_. I shrug. “Call it a hunch.”

Very slowly, his stare never leaving me, he nods, and the folder is whisked off of the desk. “I’ll get to it right away,” he says. “You’ll be notified as soon as I know anything.” And his hand is to the phone, calling someone to escort me out.

***

A few days later the dragon’s been vanquished, the damsel’s been rescued, and the case is closed. That’ll be Harry: 1, Things That Go Bump In The Night: 0. At least for the present. Of course, this time yesterday I was facing a brick wall of a dead end. This time yesterday, I didn’t know if I’d make it out of this alive, to say nothing of the woman I’d been trying to help.

And then one phone call from that smug bastard Marcone cleared the whole thing up. As much his case as mine. Of course I was the one being thanked profusely by the woman’s boyfriend, and the one getting paid a rather handsome fee for my assistance. I was the one who saved the day, as far as they knew. I bet if I told them who was responsible for cracking this case, they wouldn’t believe me. Hell, I’m not even sure I believe myself. I went to Marcone as a last ditch effort at fighting off the inevitable.

I’m still not sure what I got out of it. It was supposed to let me off the hook, this asking him for help. No need to rack up favors, especially not from someone like him. Instead I hoped to sever any ties between us.

Of course, like all things, it didn’t go the way I planned, and I’m left here at the end of the day wondering, completely against my will, if maybe now _I_ owe _him_. 


End file.
